(04) Big Data: The Management Revolution

Question 1

Business executives sometimes ask us, “Isn’t ‘big data’ just another way of saying ‘analytics’?” It’s true that they’re related: The big data movement, like analytics before it, seeks to glean intelligence from data and translate that into business advantage.
However, there are three key differences:state these three differences.

Answer 1

Volume
Velocity
Variety

Question 2

Companies won’t reap the full benefits of a transition to using big data unless they’re able to manage change effectively. Five areas are particularly important in that process. State these five areas.

Answer 2

(1) Leadership
(2) Talent management
(3) Technology
(4) Decision making
(5) Company culture

Question 3

Leadership

Answer 3

Companies succeed in the big data era not simply because they have more or better data, but because they have leadership teams that set clear goals, define what success looks like, and ask the right questions.

Question 4

Talent Management

Answer 4

As data become cheaper, the complements to data become more valuable. Some of the most crucial of these are data scientists and other professionals skilled at working with large quantities of information.

Question 5

Technology

Answer 5

The tools available to handle the volume, velocity, and variety of big data have improved greatly in recent years.
However, these technologies do require a skill set that is new to most IT departments, which will need to work hard to integrate all the relevant internal and external sources of data.

Question 6

Decision making

Answer 6

An effective organization puts information and the relevant decision rights in the same location. In the big data era, information is created and transferred, and expertise is often not where it used to be. The artful leader will create an organization flexible enough to minimize the “not invented here” syndrome and maximize cross-functional cooperation.

Question 7

Getting Started You don’t need to make enormous up-front investments in IT to use big data (unlike earlier generations of IT-enabled change). Here’s one approach to building a capability from the ground up.

Answer 7

1. Pick a business unit to be the testing ground. It should have a quant friendly leader backed up by a team of data scientists.
2. Challenge each key function to identify five business opportunities based on big data, each of which could be prototyped within five weeks by a team of no more than five people.

3.Implement a process for innovation that includes four steps:

experimentation,
measurement,
sharing,
and replication.

4. Keep in mind Joy’s Law: “Most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

Open up some of your data sets and analytic challenges to interested parties across the internet and around the world.